1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a card output device, especially to a card output device for a shuffling machine that controls the shuffling machine to output cards or not.
2. Description of the Prior Arts
Shuffling is to randomize a deck of cards and is an important procedure for a card game. Thus, the card game needs a dealer to shuffle and deal the cards with his hands. However, since shuffling with hands makes cheat possible, is slow and injuries the dealer's hands with repetitive motions, a shuffling machine is designed in order to fairly, fast and automatically shuffling the cards.
A conventional shuffling machine comprises a shuffling device, a card input device and a card output device.
The shuffling device has a shuffling wheel, a controller and a discharging device. The shuffling wheel has multiple card slots being formed radially around the shuffling wheel. Each card slot allows multiple cards being stored inside the card slot. The controller is electrically connected to the shuffling wheel and controls the shuffling wheel to rotate in a random direction by a random number of degrees. The discharging device is mounted on the shuffling wheel and selectively corresponds to one of the card slot of the shuffling wheel to push the cards being stored inside the card slot out of the card slot.
The card input device is mounted adjacent to the shuffling wheel, allows multiple decks of cards being placed in the card input device and draws the cards one by one into the card slots of the shuffling wheel of the shuffling device.
The card output device is mounted adjacent to the shuffling wheel, is opposite to the card input device and receives the cards being pushed out of the card slots of the shuffling wheel.
Since the shuffling wheel rotates in a random direction by a random number of degrees, the cards being placed on the card input device are randomly stored in and pushed out of the card slots of the shuffling wheel. Then, the dealer takes cards from the card output device in sequence and deals the cards to players of the card game.
However, the conventional shuffling machine outputs cards continuously as long as there are cards in the card slots of the shuffling wheel. Therefore, when a dealer dealing cards slower than the shuffling machine outputting cards, or the players have had enough cards for a card game and the dealing work is paused, the cards being output from the shuffling machine are scattered around the card output device causing a chaos on a desk and, even more, interrupting after card games.
To overcome the shortcomings, the present invention provides a card output device for a shuffling machine to mitigate or obviate the aforementioned problems.